Hoax populi: if we love populist leaders so much, why don't we elect one - as president

Washington Monthly, Dec, 1992 by David Shipley

Nineteen ninety two was going to be different. This was the year Americans were going to ditch the professional politicians. After all, look what the pros did to us four years ago.

It didn't turn out that way, of course. Though Ross Perot won nearly 20 percent of the popular vote, the presidential election came down to a choice between two Big Leaguers who'd played politics nearly all their adult lives. Still, our thwarted hunt for a populist leader was important, not because of the true heroes it turned up-none-but because it brought us face to face with what we were really seeking: our own presence in the political process.

The national mythology rests on the blithe conviction that amateurs can run a democracy. We can pluck from our midst a non-politician, a rough-hewn leader able to speak the truth from his or her unsullied heart. Any one of us could do it. From the New Hampshire primary on, we cried out for such a person. Yet aspirant after aspirant just didn't measure up.

Some candidates clearly didn't deserve to carry the torch of political amateurism. Pat Buchanan's man-of-the-people mask didn't stay on long. The guy was a pundit, he drove a Mercedes, he even grew up in Washington. Jerry Brown was reared in politics. He claimed to have seen the dark side of big money and then came back (clothes tattered, a black eye, cuts, and bruises), but his too-belated conversion never really seemed credible. It only played up his weirdness.

Paul Tsongas also stalled. Although for many he seemed to be a viable outsider, the problem was: for whom? His unpolished goofiness and talk of bitter medicine seemed fresh to the Eastern Volvo crowd. But when he took his message to the rest of the country--at least judging from his anemic performance in the Midwestern and Southern primaries--he was speaking the alien tongue of the Northern elite.

Ross Perot came the closest. "You got a stray dog that nobody's sure has ever been vaccinated," he said about himself. "Then we got the two registered dogs over here," he added, referring to Bill Clinton and George Bush. "And, believe me, by the time they got through blow-drying their hair and pasting them all up, they looked like they've just been to the kennel show." At one point in the early summer, Perot led Bush and Clinton in the polls. But he could have done better. He could have won.

Perot's failures as a populist are threefold. First, he fatally transformed himself into a more political creature: Perot II steered clear of such inflammatory topics as means testing Social Security. Second, the Texan was severely hurt by his decision to embark on further adventures in paranoia. The third and most important failure was his conspicuous lack of compassion. Good populists aren't Darwinian. Perot's curt dismissal of his son at a damage control press conference, his media killing sprees and other moments of intolerance made some of us wonder what would happen if we weren't world-class. If we couldn't keep up on the march to Washington, would he ditch us too?

Gliblock

Most revealing in our search for the populist hero, however, was our reaction to Admiral James B. Stockdale, Perot's running mate. After we slammed the door on applicant after applicant, we beheld a man who embodied everything we'd been asking for. Stockdale was neither a politician nor a salesman and--best of all--he hadn't even wanted the job (Perot had asked him). He should have been the poster boy for our democratic myth.

Like Kierkegaard's "man of faith," Stockdale was to be a hidden leader we'd pass on the street. He was the kind of guy who'd blend in with the rest of us at the Cineplex on Friday night. Even his name evoked what we wanted: stores brimming with fruits and vegetables, verdant hillsides, safety, solidity, traffic officers at school crosswalks.

But when James Stockdale took the stage in Atlanta, when America came face to face with the virgin leader we'd been searching for all year to guide us out of our domestic mess, we wanted to run screaming from the room. We make a fetish of ridiculing the varnished hair of Dan Quayle and Al Gore, but what an unnerving apparition was Admiral Stockdale's too-vital shock of uncontrollable white.

The amateur's entry into the lions' den of the professionals turned out to be the ultimate anxiety dream. Stockdale seemed to have fallen through layers of unconsciousness onto a kleig-lit stage. There he was, cornered between two trained lions: a senator who came through with a subject, a verb, and an object every time and a vice president who made up in quickness and Midwestern boosterism what he lacked in grammar. "Who am I," was all the Admiral could ask. "Why am I here?"

After his performance, even the most ardent of cheerleaders for populism would have had trouble envisioning him in the Oval Office. Still, you couldn't blame Stockdale for playing with his glasses, tripping over his words, and saying the weird things from deep in the id that we all say under pressure. We understood all too well why he stabbed the podium with his thick, black pen as if he was trying to find a hidden ejector button that would blast him back to the safety of his office at the Hoover Institution.